JOLLY DAYS

That's Jarrell Not Jor-el

A 1999 article about Randall Jarrell by Michael Wood in the NYRB had many Jarrell quotes worth pulling:

• I die or live by accident alone
• Permanence is what we all want when we can love and be loved; Change is what we want when we cannot.
• An artist is not supposed to know what he is doing
• A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.
• [Critics are] “the bane of our age, because our age so fantastically overestimates their importance and so willingly forsakes the works they are writing about for them.”